Recommended way ho to create this. This is very short explanation, sorry for that. Better will come later. Also this is mainly for people familiar with Android developing. If you're not, better is to use already created skins and look at them. To edit, use just simple NotePad! Much easier!!

1. download and install whole eclipse and Android SDK tools from here http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html2. after all works, create new android project. This will create base data structure. You'll not need anything program3. project contains res/layout/main.xml file, that's our target. Learn with Eclipse GUI builder and edit this file4. put resources (best to use 9-patch images) into res folders (supported, drawable, drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi, drawable-ldpi)5. after compilation, take mail.xml file and image resources from compiled source (this is because of 9-patch images. If you want to use basic png files, you can add them directly into result. 9-patch have to be precompiled!).

You do not have to do previous steps. You can edit xml file directly in any editor. Previous steps are just recommended way for easy "Drag and drop" creating and also only way to support 9-patch images

And how to get actually all this works?Locus/data/customScreen/ (root directory)

Place your main layout file into layout directory (or two files, one to layout-land, second to layout-port) and rename it to main.xml. That is important, because main.xml file is gate to whole layout, it have to be included!

also in root of you ZIP file, you can place these files (optional)

icon.png - small (48x48px) logo of your skin

info.html - HTML page that will contain description of you skin (some links, donate button or similar is possible)

Finally, place this zip file, into root directory described above!

Active Views, you can use (warning, only limited functionality on almost all items - still in develop) and Actions you can apply are described in topics below

locus:actionClick - allow to handle specific actions. This is way how to directly control some actions in Locus

locus:actionVisibility - allow to this button to show/hide other view by defined ID. So for example, you somewhere in xml define to any view android:id="@+id/myView", and then you can anywhere define this Button object, and give it attribute locus:actionVisibility="@+id/myView", which cause, that by tapping, you'll be hiding and showing View with this ID! (small tip: when you define to button locus:actionVisibility="@+id/locus_top_panel", this button will control whole top panel!!)

locus:slideStartPosition - position value of first image pixel (compare to SlideView). It means when you define SlideView width to 100dip, this value to 50dip and slideStartValue to 0, then for actual action value 0, image will start at center of view.

Help pls: with first simple skin, it worked. Now when clicking customer screen button, I always get errormessage:Cannot get main.xml layout file.I copied the zip files into .. customerscreen without de-zipp. What am I doing wrong ?Rob

thanks for this very nice Program, thanks for this nice new feature ;-)

I try to make my own today, but cant get it work like I want it to. There were always errors in textsize. The texts are rendered to small.Then I try to repack your sample "Simple map.zip" and earned the same error. (see attachment)The file was created with 7-zip.

I think, the creation of own screens will be possible in future releases. Those sample's are just for an impression!

I tried it myself to create some custom screens, but nothing worked! Seems to be releated with zipping.Because unpacking one of the samples and repacking it without any changes will corrupt it!Locus is unable to find main.xml.

When unzipping via contextmenu in windows -> "Extract to folder <archiveName>" all contents of archive will be put in this folder!After that i modified main.xml!When finished, i selected this folder and created an archive of it! But the resulting structure is changed:-> <archiveName>.zip/<archiveName>/layout/main.xmlmust Be: <archiveName>.zip/layout/main.xml

You are zipping with full path... Try this.. Open to folder simple Map Select sub-folders assets,layout and the folders info.html and icon.png.. Right-click use option Zip (Im using zipgenius) It will create a zip with 2 sub-folder and 2 files WITHOUT FULL PATH... !

anyway for all:- sample FONT used in samples isn't ideal. It was only a sample. I'm sure, you'll find much better ... try to look for example here http://www.1001freefonts.com/- your skin is probably tested on your phone but on my HDPI resolution it looks bad ... look at screenshot. So Maybe you can descrease a little size of fonts, or I should create some mechanism for settings more then one size of text depend on resolution- to align text in layout you can use "gravity" attribute on TextView object